Into the Light

It is a picture that I overlooked because I was trying to make a picture of the full moon. This picture obviously failed. Or, did it?

If I was only trying to photograph the moon, for sure, it failed. If I was trying to make something a little different from the usual than it succeeded. At least it did for me. You may be walking away, shaking your head and laughing. “You call THAT a picture?”

Oh yeah. The moon is the little round white light towards the left bottom center of the picture.

Anyway.

Let this be a lesson to us all. Especially me. Don’t chimp. Don’t delete. Don’t even look at questionable pictures for a couple of days. And, when you do, make sure that you look at them on a big monitor. Those itty bitty LCDs on the back of your camera or on the front of your phone are next to useless when it comes to evaluating a picture. I keep yammering away about that. I hope you hear me. By the way, yammering is a veiled reference to some of the early comics of the late, great Stan Lee. Somebody was always yammering at somebody else.

Think about the next issue. You made a bunch of pictures that are sharp. They are technically proficient enough.

Great.

You don’t have to publish all of them. I see so many blogs where the blogger publishes way too many pictures. That’s great if they tell a story. That’s terrible if most them look about the same.

Food bloggers are the worst. I’m pretty sure they read something that said a lot of pictures are a good thing, without understanding that the pictures should be different and probably tell a story.

That’s especially true with recipes.

Recipes are a process, and fit very neatly into a particular form of storytelling. It is more-or-less, beginning, middle and end. In this case, the end comes first in order to catch the reader’s eye. The rest of the middle pictures show the reader how make the finished food. That’s actually easier in video form. That’s why so many YouTube “how to” videos are so popular. I use them all the time. The end picture — the closer — is another version of the first picture. The same. But, different.

That’s the story. Of telling. Heh. See what I did there?

There are other storytelling forms. I’ll get there eventually. But, I am late to publishing. Many of you are late to reading.